TinyBrite: the easiest way to use a chain of MegaBrites, ShiftBrites or anything based on the A6281 PWM LED driver.
Home: http://www.flyingcarsandstuff.com/projects/tinybrite
If you want a simple way to use a chain of MegaBrites, ShiftBrites or anything based on the A6281 PWM LED driver, the TinyBrite library will handle all the details for you.
Using TinyBrite can be as simple as:
chain_of_lights.sendColor(R, G, B); // yay!
TinyBrite doesn't need SPI, so you can drive the RGB LEDs even with ATTiny-based Arduino-compatible hardware like the (Digistump) Digispark!
The library was developed for small Arduino-compatible boards, but in addition to working with all Arduinos it should be usable on pretty much any Atmel AVR chip and probably relatively easily with other microcontrollers, too, with a little tweaking.
The Macetech LED modules take all the hardware-related work out of dealing with powerful RGB lighting.
MegaBrites, are a combination of 3 sets of LEDs. Each set is equivalent to 15 standard LEDs of red, green or blue. Also on-board is an A6281 (Allegro 3-Channel Constant Current LED Driver with Programmable PWM Control).
From the outside, the MegaBrite looks like a single, programmable, RGB LED. You can specify the intensity for each of red, green and blue with 10-bit resolution (a value between 0 and 1023).
Best of all, the MegaBrites are designed to be easily daisy-chained. This means that, using three or four pins on your microcontroller, you can control (almost) any number of MegaBrites with no additional components (other than wiring between the modules).
I've yet to play with ShiftBrites, but the API seems much the same with the main difference being that the megas have more juice.
The TinyBrite library uses software to handle the serial communication with the 'brites.
The downside is that while data is being transmitted your microcontroller will be busy (i.e. you have to account for the transmit time if you're dealing with stringent timing constraints).
The main advantage of bit banging the comm in this way is that there are no special requirements for your microcontroller--there is no need for SPI support, or if it's available you can dedicate it to something else, and you can use any three of the available pins for clock, latch and data transmission.
For an overview, basic schematics, usage, a full description of the API and TinyBrite projects see: http://www.flyingcarsandstuff.com/projects/tinybrite
TinyBrite, Copyright (C) 2013 Pat Deegan, is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See file LICENSE.txt for further informations on licensing terms.